High Earning Spammers Face Tougher Sentences 157
netbuzz writes "More big-time spammers may find themselves doing longer stretches behind bars if a federal judge's first-of-its-kind sentencing decision in a Denver case becomes widely applied. In a sense, these spammers would be hoisted on their own profits, as language in CAN-SPAM allows the use of their profits instead of the difficult-to-measure financial damage they cause in establishing a prison sentence. The Denver spammer earned $250,000 — and a 20% longer prison stint — using this approach."
"Hoisted on their own profits" (Score:4, Funny)
Re:"Hoisted on their own profits" (Score:4, Interesting)
Yay! Grammar knowledge goodness.
But, I can't agree with them being hanged as an appropriate punishment. Let's save life ending punishment for the truly worst criminals. I'm also not really sure that longer sentences will be a deterrent. Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives. Supervise them appropriately while they are serving their sentence and allow them no other computer access. A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too.
Re:"Hoisted on their own profits" (Score:5, Insightful)
They demonstrate no remorse and no regret. They commit criminal acts on a very wide scale and they somehow think it's business. The crime is executed in a cold, calculating and callous manner against people who often go through great and expensive means to avoid their acts only to have those measures thwarted with ever-increasing intent. INTENT. These guys are intent on doing what they do.
They demonstrate skill that could just as easily be used in honest ways. They choose not to for varieties of reasons, but they clearly have options and ignore the legal ones in favor of illegal ones. Why? Because they stand to make more money criminally? That's the most likely reason.
Now let's compare that to, say, armed robbery. Aside from the true professionals, armed robbers are generally pretty desperate people. Very little planning goes into the act. Get get a weapon and engage in violent and brutal behavior to get money... a relatively small amount of money at that when compared the the criminal described above. The victims are limited in number. The victims aren't usually pulled from a list, but rather someone at random... an unfortunate.
And while an armed robber might present the victim(s) with momentary fright or even injury, it's a much more honest and direct crime. It's also far less planned. The degree is intent is orders of magnitude less than that of the criminal described above. The drive for this crime is generally one of desperation; it's emotional in nature -- passionate. And let's face it. If he had better options, he would be doing that at all.
So really... which one is actually the worst person? Which is the worst crime? Is armed robbery worse because it involves fear?! Someone ran a red light and scared me half to death the other morning! By that measure, a red-light runner is worse than a spammer... and let's not forget that more people die in those types of accidents than from armed robbery, let alone spamming. So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse?
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Come on. Wrap your head around this: Armed robberies often involve people getting shot and killed. Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone.
And in most (94% or higher) states, the only death qualified felonies (if any) are homicides and rape (especially the rape of children). Spam is simply not in the same ballpark as other crimes.
Now that's not to say that I don't
Re:"Hoisted on their own profits" (Score:4, Interesting)
Armed robbery is taking advantage of the legally disarmed. Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber. Or better still, do like they do in RP and have a uniformed, badged and openly armed security guard at the entrance.
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While we can argue about whether deterrence actually works, that's the purpose. It has nothing to do with thought crimes. It has to do with serving the purpose of criminal punishment--pr
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Finally, punishing criminals for what they're thinking when they commit a crime is nothing new. ... A murder is a homicide committed with "malice aforethought." It's punished more harshly solely based on what the murderer was thinking when he committed the crime. That's not a thought crime.
Eh? How do you define "thought crime" then?
I wrote:
Justice is getting punished for what you've done wrong, not for what you might have done wrong.
If it were up to me, I'd eliminate the thought crime variants of murder that you outlined. I have pages and pages of notes on this when I was trying to draw up a basic penal code for the fictional nation I created on NationStates, I'll have to dig those up sometime. So basically you are dead wrong here:
You're entirely overlooking the deterrent purposes of penal punishment.
Nope, sorry. You get behind the steering wheel of a car[1] and kill someone? That's murder and it should be punished as such and that's how I define
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Eh? How do you define "thought crime" then?
Thoughtcrime, from the Orwellian definition, is the crime of thinking something inappropriate. A thoughtcrime is one in which no physical crime is committed, but the perpetrator is guilty of inappropriate thought. A modern example of thoughtcrime is the apostasy statue in Saudi Arabia where changing your religion away from Islam is punishable by death.
There is a world of difference between this and altering the punishments based on intent. Do you think that someone who buys a gun for the express purp
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Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber.
A liquor store that I go to occasionally recently switched ownership to a retired marine and his son, whom both open carry handguns on their waists while they are working. From the looks of them, you'd be a fool to even consider robbing that place. I also understand that a bunch of the issues that store used to have disappeared almost overnight.
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As
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There's no aspect of "thought crime" whatsoever involved. Putting people at risk is doing something wrong. That's one of the reasons there's a difference between robbery and armed robbery, or why you can be arrested for DUI even though you haven't crashed into anything or anyone.
And this is where you have been brainwashed. To use an extreme example, if someone drinks until they are falling-down drunk, drives to the nearest liquor store and buys more booze and drives back home without hurting anyone, what crime has been committed?
It is thought crime.
"Endangering other people" is such a nebulous concept that it can be applied to anything and that makes it worthless as a criteria for determining criminal intent.
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The crime is putting people at unacceptable risk.
"Unacceptable risk" is just too nebulous to define reasonably. You have either committed a crime or you haven't.
The United States is supposed to be a nation of laws not men, and interpretations just invite misunderstanding (or misunderestimating as the case may be).
By your argument, it should be perfectly legal to run around firing a gun in random directions until you happen to hit someone. Yes, "endangering other people" is a subjective term--that's why we have lawmakers who (in theory) create rules that exlpicitly state what the community considers acceptable.
True and I also would consider someone running around firing a gun randomly to be impolite at best and a public nuisance. But unless she kills someone, she's not guilty of murder.
I compare this case directly with President Ahmadinejad, who ha
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It is thought crime."
Whoa! The crime committed is drinking and driving. Just because you aren't caught doesn't mean a crime hasn't been committed. The law says if you drive at
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Whoa! The crime committed is drinking and driving. Just because you aren't caught doesn't mean a crime hasn't been committed. The law says if you drive at .08 or higher you are driving drunk. You committed the crime, you just didn't get caught. The law was still broken.
I meant committing a crime in the more abstract sense of what harm has been done? I don't really want to get in a discussion pro or con of the nuances of US laws as they are only getting more broken as time passes, but ...
What difference does it make that a crime has been committed that cannot be prosecuted? Let's take a different and less extreme example. Traffic violations are something that everyone does, whether it's going a mile or two above the posted speed limit, not coming to complete stop at a
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Your drunk driving analogy is, with all due respect, a bit off. In reference to your Tokyo experience, that's a good cop versus the some fraction of bad cops out there...especially here in the US. If you had been driving I think his response would
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Your drunk driving analogy is, with all due respect, a bit off. In reference to your Tokyo experience, that's a good cop versus the some fraction of bad cops out there...especially here in the US. If you had been driving I think his response would have been different.
Sadly, I also have direct experience with that. They advertise a zero tolerance approach to drinking and driving (any amount of alcohol is forbidden). We hit a random road block on the way back from a karaoke bar and the test used was to have the driver blow onto the officer's hand, which he sniffed. The penalty for a first time offense for a Japanese in Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken in winter 1999/2000 was a 40,000 yen fine, two month license suspension and mandatory driving school in Mito (including some p
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Dear Friend,
I am writing to you in relation to a proposition I hope you can help me for. I am current on holiday in a famous African country of which I am visitor. Recently the president has become angried and left with him a letter declaring that one thousand (1000) foreigners to be executed. I was hoping that you would call our embassy and ask for them to assist me in the next four (4) hours before I am shot. For thi
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Life or death email? Who would send an email in a life or death situation? What if your ISP is down, what if a backhoe operator got drunk, what if you use Lotus Notes?
Please, get a grip, any life or death situation is dealt with by phone or in person unless yo
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Beyond the obvious effects of wasted bandwith, time, storage etc. the effects of spam will tend to be random sideeffects which may be good or bad and probably cancel out.
Not unreasonable but I disagree; on average spam will cause more problems than it solves, because on average spam is deceptive junk designed to advantage the spammer and disadvantage the receiver. If the average spam was neutral, non-manipulative and non-deceptive your position would be valid but in general this is not true and the side
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Re:"Hoisted on their own profits" (Score:4, Interesting)
But the users of the net? The millions if not billions of dollars being spent and/or lost due to spams and scams, security compromises and all the problems caused by spammers. You may idealistically claim to think that no amount of money is worth a single human life, but the facts are not in your favor. If the lives of strangers are so important to you, what are you doing to stop their tragic ends? Trying to stop the war "on terror" are you? I kinda doubt it.
Life and death happens for a variety of reasons and a variety of causes in a variety of ways. Generally speaking, the most pleasant ways to die are those that involve lethal injections or sleeping. Beyond that, the tragedy of death will happen to everyone. It's what's between birth and death that needs to be cared for the most and when a single individual can be responsible for so much expense, trouble and misery spread out evenly across the world. Death is unavoidable. Spam is completely needless.
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People who are close to the problem know there's a LOT of issues in dealing with spam and it's more than annoying emails selling viagra. It has grown into some serious security issues whereby spam is used as a vehicle for other criminal acts such as the creation and maintenance of botnets. Network security on private and public networks are being compromised by and for spam and its content. It has grown WELL beyond the triviality of the
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So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse?
and neither did he write anything about punishment nor did you answer his question.
See my earlier post in this thread for my thoughts on a comparison between armed robbery and spamming.
Your question is:
Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal?
I wouldn't, unless as a result of the consequences of the spam, someone died. I think with high probability unfortunate engineers in Japanese ISPs (and elsewhere) have died from overwork combatting spam. They call it Karoshi i
spamming and murder (Score:2)
well ok, people only live for a finite period of time and any time spent dealing with spam is time you'll never get back. The chance of any given person being murdered is relatively small, but everyone has received a spam; assuming a spam consumes 5 seconds, 250,000 spams is likely killing a person 57 days early. So really the question is how long did Kervorkian go to prison for?
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He is. He is deliberately endangering other people's lives to save a few seconds of his time. Children are especially likely to simply cross on green, making them especially vulnerable for these kinds of assholes.
A red light runner should lose his driving license for good. If he can't be trusted to obey such a simple rule with such a high chance of someone getting hurt as a result, he can't be trusted with a car, period.
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What makes crime worse - it may depend on the circumstances. The drop of water that hollows the stone may be as mean as the shotgun that blows it apart. If they make money from the spam (the usually do) there has to b
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Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives.
Yeah, that sounds about right, but I'd add they should insert one message every so often that has to be printed out and presented to the parole officer. Make the punishment fit the crime.
TFA said he had made an estimated $250k in profit. On the one hand, dang, that's a lot of v1agra, on the other hand, it said he bought 200M email addresses a few years ago and had been arrested with 7.5M addresses on his computer, i.e. even with a horrible response rate and a >95% garbage mailing list it can still add
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Re:"Hoisted on their own profits" (Score:4, Interesting)
Why the fuck does everyone hate on email spammers when they're easily filtered out (for the most part), but they're okay allowing credit card companies and other companies to spam our mailboxes? I hit delete when I see a stock scam, whoop-de-fuckin'-do! But when I get credit card offers and magazines and shit I never asked for in my physical mailbox, I not only have to throw it away, but I have to make sure that no sensitive information is thrown away with it, AND I have to sort out what can be recycled and what can't be (if I feel environmentally conscious).
Beating up on e-spammers is in vogue, and nerds just eat it up and love it. However, physical spam is legal and done continuously with much greater consequences.
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Why the fuck does everyone hate on email spammers when they're easily filtered out (for the most part),
Ay, there's the rub. You still have to do a quick scan to make sure your filter didn't misroute a message.
but they're okay allowing credit card companies and other companies to spam our mailboxes? I hit delete when I see a stock scam, whoop-de-fuckin'-do! But when I get credit card offers and magazines and shit I never asked for in my physical mailbox, I not only have to throw it away,
I'm not. However, for me, email addresses are far more permanent than meat space addresses. Since I've had my @xemacs.org mailing address (1995), I've had 12 meat space addresses (hey, I'm a contractor and I move around a lot).
My first piece of mail in Japan, once I got a visa and permanent address, was a flyer from an English Conversation school with Celine Dion's picture on it. The horror, the h
Re: junk snailmail. (Score:2)
You can contact the direct mail association and get on their opt-out list.
You can tell the three credit card bureaus you don't want credit card solicitations.
The post office has a form you can fill out to stop getting obscene mail from a particular sender. What you consider obscene is up to you.
If they enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope, you can (after removing your contact info) attach it to a brick or a refrigerator and mail it to them.
You can w
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Unless they decide to ignore you and continue sending mail (which they generally do). I tried getting on their opt-out list. They even required me to pay a fee to do so. Did the volume of mail I receive go down at all? Not one bit.
Do I do this? No. I have a compost heap in the flowerbed under my mailbox, with crap from the indianapolis star and advco. My real mail goes to my post office box.
Oh, if only it was so easy for me! But
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-They NEVER gave me anything that addressed that error or even said what it meant, or followed up when I tried a related link.
-They repeatedly suggested things I already tried.
-They wanted to know which OS I had installed -- you know, the OS that it never gets an option to load.
-Every solution assumed I had a CD burner -- you know, the one that I could no longer access thanks to installing Ubuntu while following the instructions I
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There, fixed.
Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, well, American jurisprudence overcomes all obstacles, I guess.
Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice (Score:5, Interesting)
If Bob, the neighborhood dealer, was offering as much product as these scumbags, he'd be in jail for life.
Oh well, we have the anti-spam laws now, so we might as well hit them for both.
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Spam laws are a waste, nail them for the real felonies they are committing to send their crap.
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Won't someone please think of the children^W spam! (Score:2, Insightful)
I keep wondering, why do we need to charge the spammers with anti-spam laws.
Because otherwise, you couldn't get slashbots to support the destruction of the first amendment. It sounds a little like, "Won't someone please think of the children^W spam!!!" Yes, we need to stop the email scammers/phishers/trojans, we need to stop people peddling deadly/addictive drugs via email, we need to stop the email pump and dump scam artists.... We don't need to make it illegal to send an email message to 20 million
Re:Won't someone please think of the children^W sp (Score:2)
That being said, I'm a fan of punishing the existing crime rather than making up new ones for every circumstance.
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1. obvious and intentional exaggeration.
Suitable punishment (Score:5, Funny)
Viagra requires intent to function. (Score:3, Informative)
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*ducks*
Sounds like a new incentive to be a tax cheat (Score:2)
Of course you have to risk the rath of your taxing authority... but still.
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What that says about our country, I'd rather not contemplate.
In a perfect world... (Score:4, Funny)
if the spam ads were true (Score:2)
Am I missing anything?
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One Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:One Solution (Score:4, Funny)
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Funny, but not so. The same happens all over the world. The humor columnist L.M. Boyd used to have several such funny name/job listings every week, and the Annals of Improbable Research carries some still.
But I wouldn't say that to his face. He's a 6 foot something, 200 pound retired Marine who, despite being in his sixties, inserted himself bodily between a spammer and an anti-spamme
Makes some sense, but not much (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Makes some sense, but not much (Score:4, Insightful)
Real reason they are coming down hard on Spammers (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Real reason they are coming down hard on Spamme (Score:2)
Income calculation? (Score:2, Interesting)
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what good has the antispam law done for the users? (Score:2)
Prison, really? (Score:2)
I hate spam, I HATE spam. But, 2.5 years in jail? Seems silly. Here's a guy that could obviously be productive in society if he pursued something worthwhile. So why not levee a large fine, give him some supervision and help him contribute positively. Seems way better than paying $45k a year to keep him.
Re:Prison, really? (Score:4, Interesting)
But you have to do it anyway, as a message to the next guy that you're serious. The severity of the punishment has zero to do with what this guy did, and everything to do with how strong a message you want to send to the next guy.
In the case of spam, though, deterrence is fruitless. There will always be somebody undeterred, and the economics of spam make that one guy aggravating all out of proportion.
It's why Slashdotters semi-seriously call for much, much harsher punishments. They feel very, very strongly about the message, precisely because they know that it's unlikely to be heard.
Re:Prison, really? (Score:4, Interesting)
When someone is a danger to society, locking them up protects society. Spammers, no matter how annoying are not dangerous to society. Meanwhile, locking them up costs society money. So the best and most effective action that society can take is to fine them. This works especially well for these types of crimes when people are fraudulently making money. Take away all that illegally made money and then some more for our troubles.
Fines (Score:2)
They'll simply ignore fines and say they haven't got any money to pay them.
Nope. What you need to do is take away their chosen lifestyle. No more late night parties, no fancy cars or big TV sets for them, just getting up early in the morning and doing a decent day's work in the community. Every single day. There's a million things out there which need fixing/cleaning up.
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O RLY?
I guess I'll just go out an light a joint then to make this dreadful morning a bit more toleratable.
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I wish I could get away with sniping at people after quoting four or five words, completely ignoring the qualifications around said words. Unfortunately that wouldn't be very entertaining to read by anyone except people who already agree with me so I'd have to find a way to pad it out with some sort of filler...maybe I should join a political campaign. Any of them.
Anyway, clearly there are people who get drunk/high at work, you may even have seen them before. People break laws all t
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Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!
Some people would. You can find them in mos
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Yes, really. (Score:2)
Locking them up will stop them doing it and allow them time to think about what they've done. Remove spammers and you remove a big burden on society, how much do you think companies spend on anti-spam compared to how much it costs to put a spammer away?
Stupid (Score:2)
And after a spammer stole so much from society, why is even more being stolen from the taxpayer to give him an admittedly longer sentence in jail?
I hate spammers as much as the next guy, (Score:3, Insightful)
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Introduce yourself to the concept of "crime and punishment". They exist in harmony and balance.
To suggest that spamming (crime) should not result in jail (punishment), is out of balance thinking.
What wonderful logic (Score:2)
And you can apply that logic to assault, armed robbery, rape and murder.
the point is it punishes the offender and stops them from doing it. If the capture rate becomes a high enough percentage of people spamming then it becomes a true deterrant, even if not it stops that guy that has comitted those criminal acts from continuing to do so.
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Spammers are a danger to society. They prove that by continuing to spam people who have anti-spam measures in place, by working around protections, by carrying on doing what they're doing despite it being unwanted and illegal.
Locking them up is of direct good to everyone else - it stops them spamming and takes a belligerent criminal off the str
False analogies (Score:2)
Spam passed from being a nuisance when it started costing people and businesses vast amounts of time, bandwidth and money.
Spammers are belligerent criminals who will continue to commit their crimes unless locked away.
In your example the person playing the music would have their stereo confiscated.
If they were doing it del
Attack the sources of the spam instead. (Score:4, Interesting)
That said i really dont think spamming is a felony just as i dont think any other form of marketing should be illegal. Its annoying for sure but the fault lies in our broken emailsystem and with Microsofts crappy security (spammers favourite mailservers are windows boxes). Spam is just symptoms for a bigger issue. Take away the spam and the problem is still there for more nefarious schemes.
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Oh, and your point on Squashing them in the US and them popping up elsewhere is disingenuous - Most spam is sent by and aimed at americans. Squashing them in the US would do a great deal of good.
So if I steal a quarter... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers, but punishing people based on profit they make from ill-gotten gains, rather than the damage they actually caused, seems to be as violating fundemantal principles of justice.
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Spammers profit in proportion to how much they spam, as a rule. Therefore one that makes millions most likely has spammed a lot more than one that's only made a few bucks.
Democratic mentality (Score:2)
Idiotic mentality (Score:2)
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